More Than You Know (25 page)

ing . . .

I thought about the thing we saw, Connie and I, down in the

yard behind where the house had stood. What was it wearing? Some-

thing black, a cloak, or shawls. I didn’t know. I knew I couldn’t de-

scribe it, it hadn’t been that kind of . . . I could hear that grotesque

weeping and feel the ache in my throat. I was afraid that recalling the

ghost would, literally, recall it. Call it back to me.

I tried to stop thinking. I tried to recite poems. “The Wreck of

the
Hesperus.
” “The First Snow-Fall.” A strange choice in summer,

but it kept starting up in my head: “The snow had begun in the gloam-

ing, and busily all the night . . .”

Suddenly I knew that Whitey was awake. He was listening to

something in the hall outside the door, something I couldn’t hear. I

heard a soft growl.

It was out there, preying, waiting for an opening. I went clammy

with fear. I pulled all the blankets off my bed and went and sat in the

chair by the window with my back to the wall. I sat up in the dark

and looked out at the sliver of bay I could see from there, and waited

for the moon to set.

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Spring 1886

Mercy didn’t go back to the Haskell house to sleep. She

wasn’t used to the kind of raw conflict she had witnessed, and she didn’t

want to be under the same roof with it. She was afraid it would somehow

explode and besplatter her. She wanted to go home.

She spent the night upstairs in the schoolhouse. She would later

testify that in the morning, which was fine, she took a long walk around

the corner of the island to visit her Aunt Gott, but when she got there,

she couldn’t go in. She couldn’t shake off a feeling of worry and sickness,

she said. Finally, mindful of the open weather and the laundry that never

dried in the wet, she said she walked back and went down to the wash-

house in the Haskells’ yard, which was, by agreement, hers to use on

Sunday mornings. She said she was in the yard when she saw Sallie run

out of the house and off toward the schoolhouse. Mercy said she left her

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wash in the tub and followed. Why? she was asked, over and over. Because

it was her schoolhouse. She was the schoolmistress.

When she got to the schoolhouse she saw smoke coming from the

chimney in the upstairs front room. She went up and found Claris and

Sallie sitting together. Sallie looked up. Claris didn’t. Claris had the iron

stove poker in her hand, and she was knocking it rhythmically on the

floor as she rocked in the chair, as if it soothed her.

Mercy stared at her, then looked at Sallie again. She suddenly won-

dered what was in the stove; it didn’t smell like firewood alone. There

was a scorching smell, the same smell as when you leave a hot iron on

the cloth too long. Also something animal, and metallic, like blood. Mercy

opened the door to the stove and then shut it again. There was a dress

in the fire.

“My father’s dead,” Sallie said. Mercy sat down on a stool.

“Somebody killed him.” Sallie looked at Mercy calmly as she

said it.

Danial, they meant. Danial was dead now.

“Now she can marry Paul,” said Claris.

Mercy turned and looked at her. Sallie merely said, “Paul’s gone,

Mother.” To Mercy she added, “They’re looking for him.”

Looking for Paul? But why? Paul had gone yesterday, or the day

before. As she understood it.

Sallie added, “Now we’re helping Mother.”

Mercy sat still on the stool and watched them.

“Where were you?” Sallie asked Mercy suddenly. Her voice had an

odd quality, loud and flat, as if she’d gone deaf overnight.

“I spent the night here, on the cot. This morning I went for a

walk.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did you meet anybody?”

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“No.”

Mother and daughter looked at Mercy.

“It will be best not to talk about it,” said Sallie.

These people think I can read their minds, thought Mercy. That’s

the way they carry on. Maybe if you treat each other like that, you get

to where you actually can. Maybe she could. They were thinking, If none

of us will talk about it, nobody can do anything to any of us. We live

in our own bubble, we make our own rules. It’s nobody else’s business

anyway.

The two Haskell women were looking at Mercy, and she suddenly

saw that they knew all about her feeling of sickness in the morning, and

what it meant. What if, when the police finally came about Danial, mother

and daughter turned to her and pointed?

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I know Edith wanted me sent away, home toBoston,orany-

where else, but apparently it was impossible. Father was working harder

than ever; there would be nothing to keep me from running wild at

home. Boarding schools were not in session, and it was in all ways

too late for summer camp. Typical. When I was low and upset and

wanted to go, she wouldn’t let me. Now, loving Conary, I was des-

perate to stay. Edith said if I must stay with her, I had to have a job.

Someplace out of the house, where I could be watched. I said I would

rake blueberries when they started hiring. Edith said no; she suspected

that outdoors with no one much watching me, side by side with a lot

of Micmac Indians, I would find a way to see Connie, and she was

right. Not only that, raking was miserable work but it paid real money.

Money bought freedom. Nobody thought I should have any of that. In

the end, I designed my own prison; Dot Sylvester took me on to help

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her with the switchboard mornings when she scheduled her fittings,

and I persuaded Mrs. Pease and Mrs. Allen to let me volunteer at the

library in the afternoons. They were glad to have me; there were pe-

riodicals unarchived going back years. There were books to mend and

shelve. I knew enough of the Dewey decimal system to be useful.

Everyone in the village seemed to know that Connie and I had

gotten into some kind of trouble. The first week Edith would walk

with me to Dot’s in the morning and come back to the village at five

o’clock to walk me home. Sometimes when girls my age came into

the library, girls who had grown up with Connie, they would find

excuses to hang around the front desk until they could get a look at

me. I didn’t like it. But I discovered something that surprised me and

gave me some courage. Mrs. Pease did not like Edith. Not at all. She

had heard somehow that Edith had tried to tip Mr. Crocker for bringing

me home, and it got her back up.

Sometimes in the evenings at home, the phone would ring. Edith

always answered, and several times she found the line dead. One night

I said, “It’s the ghost, Mother.” Edith shot me a poisonous look, but

not before I saw a flicker of discomfort in her expression. A phone

that rings when no one is on the line is an eerie thing. Stephen stopped

eating and looked at me.

“I found an article in a magazine I was filing yesterday,” I said

to Stephen, sounding helpful, informative. ‘Do the Dead Make Phone

Calls?’ was the title.”

“Do they?”

“Yes,” I said. “Quite nasty ones. They send telegrams too . . .”

“Stop it, Hannah,” Edith snapped at me. “You’re scaring him on

purpose. I’ve never seen such horrid behavior.”

“You’ve led a sheltered life,” I said. I couldn’t seem to help

myself. I was full of foul humor, and it was stronger than I was. I

didn’t
want to scare Stephen, but I knew I was doing it.

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“Leave the table,” said Edith, and I did. I went upstairs. I knew

perfectly well that it was Conary calling me, and it made me wild that

he couldn’t reach me. Where was he? At the pay phone outside the

drugstore? I shut my door and thought about Conary being here, right

in the front room. With another girl, but I didn’t care about that. I

wished he were with me. I knew that I was the girl he’d been looking

for, and that he of all the souls in the universe was for me. I thought

about the expression on his face when I obediently left him to get into

his father’s boat. I wanted to tell him I would never do that again.

One day when I was at the library shelving novels, I saw a girl

of about fifteen come in. She and Mrs. Pease spoke pleasantly to each

other, and then she made her way over to me. At first she pretended

to look for a book, but she soon saw Mrs. Pease was busying herself

with something else.

“Hannah,” the girl said softly to me.

I looked at her, surprised. I hadn’t seen her before, but once I

saw her light eyes, I knew who she was.

“I’m Mary,” she said. Conary’s sister.

“Is Conary here?”

She shook her head. “Dad hardly lets him out of the house. He’s

on a tear.”

“Is there any way I can see him?”

“He was afraid they’d sent you away. He tried to call you the

other night from the Jellisons’.”

“I know. Could I come down to your house?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she said. “Don’t worry, he’ll get

out. He always does.”

A woman in overalls came into the library, and Mary turned

away from me very suddenly and took a book from the shelf and

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opened it. After a moment, she turned her back to the room, and she

whispered, “I thought that was Aunt Etta. I don’t know why; she can

hardly read.”

I looked at the woman in the overalls. It was the painter from

the Colony; I’d seen her out with her easels, painting things she

thought were picturesque, like Bowdoin Leach working.

“Connie said we should choose a book. When he has a plan, the

book will be pushed in on the shelf, and that means there’s a note in

it for you.”

We both looked at the book in her hands; it was
A Christmas

Carol
by Charles Dickens.

“That one,” I said. “Nobody’s going to check that out in August.”

Mary nodded and put the book carefully back on the shelf with

its spine aligned with the other volumes. Then she left me and went

to browse in another section, and I went back to putting the Jalna

books in order. When I looked up, she had left the library.

I probably checked that book ten times a day after that. Finally,

about a week later, on my fifth visit of the day, I found it stuck back

on the shelf inches deeper than the rest of the Dickens. I hadn’t seen

Mary or Connie come in, but someone had.

The note said, “Come up to the Indian Burial Ground as soon

after five as you can get there.”

There was no signature. And I didn’t know where the Indian

Burial Ground was. I spent about an hour fretting about it and prowling

in old memorabilia about the town. Finally I figured it out; I could

ask Bowdoin. He would know, and, better, he wouldn’t care why I

wanted to know.

At five o’clock I hightailed it up to the blacksmith shed, and I

thought my heart would stop when I saw it was closed and dark. I had

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no backup plan. I stood in the yard staring at the door, as stupid as a

turkey in the rain. Just as I was about to despair and go, the kitchen

door opened and Bowdoin came painfully out of the house.

“Miss Gray,” he said. He had seen me and was coming out to

see what had brought me.

I knew it was going to seem odd, but I was wild to be away. I

just baldly asked him my question.

“Why that’s an interesting thing,” he answered. He stood look-

ing toward the village, thinking. “When the first fathers chose a

place for a cemetery, they didn’t put it beside the meeting house,

like you’d expect. I suppose that they had need of a burial place be-

fore they had a meeting house. They certainly did before they had a

settled minister. In those days, in fact right up to when I was a boy,

the Indians had their summer camp down there on the shore this

side of the Neck. Where the summer people put their golf course.

Them and the settlers lived cheek by jowl together and were a great

help to each other, and it must have been natural to share the Indi-

ans’ burying ground. Anyway, they did. All the earliest folks of the

town are up there.”

“Where is it?”

He took a good look at me.

“What do you call that haircut, now?” he said, instead of an-

swering.

“I thought it would be easier in the heat,” I said, wanting to

scream. He saw at once I wasn’t in the mood for teasing and let it go.

“You know where the Pottery is?” I did.

“You go right up past there, maybe quarter of a mile. It’s on the

left, where the old road came into town before there was a bridge over

the falls.”

“Thank you.” I took off. If Bowdoin wondered why I wanted to

know, he never asked me, and I was grateful.

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*

*

*

I went as quickly as I could; I didn’t dare run, for fear it would